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‘Grandma’s wrong about that McAndrew guy,’ whispered Jaide. ‘She has to be.’
Jack wasn’t so sure. Jaide did have a tendency to leap into things, and surely if McAndrew was an agent of The Evil, he wouldn’t advertise it in this way.
‘It could just be a coincidence, couldn’t it? I mean, it’s not really evidence.’
‘Let’s find some evidence then!’
Jaide leaped off her bike, letting it fall on the side of the road.
‘Hey! Wait!’ Jack called out. But she was already across the road and slipping through a narrow gap in the fence. Jack hurriedly propped his bike against a street sign and followed.
It was getting dark fast. Jaide opened her eyes as wide as she could in order to tiptoe safely round planks and trestles, over power cables and bags of nails. A dark, rectangular stack of corrugated iron snagged her hoody as she went by, making her heart leap into her throat. The site was quiet and apparently empty, but she couldn’t be sure of anything where The Evil was concerned. With every moment, the dusk got deeper and deeper . . .
To Jack, the light was perfectly sufficient. With the sun hidden, he felt at home and confident. He glided silently and swiftly to Jaide’s side, and was gratified by her slight gasp of surprise.
‘Don’t do that,’ she hissed, gripping his arm tightly as he led her deeper into the site. ‘See anything suspicious?’
He shook his head. Together they went round one corner of the sawmill and followed its southern wall to the back of the building, where a cement mixer and a mound of heavy bags loomed out of the shadows. Several deep trenches had been dug behind the sawmill, possibly to extend its foundations and thereby allow it to be expanded. Jack warily skirted the nearest. Even with his excellent night vision, he couldn’t see its bottom. Anything could be hiding there.
‘What’s that smell?’ Jaide asked suddenly. ‘Crushed ants?’
Something squelched underfoot. Jack looked down.
‘Yeeuch!’
He jumped backwards out of a puddle of brackish liquid, dragging Jaide with him. The puddle was several long steps across. Floating in the liquid like tiny, sad icebergs were a dozen half-dissolved rats.
‘What is it?’ asked Jaide, struggling to see anything on the ground through the thickening gloom.
‘Uh . . . you don’t want to know.’
‘I do want to know, Jack. That’s why I asked.’
He told her and she blanched.
‘Oh, that’s . . . gross.’
Headlights washed over them and they ducked behind a portable toilet. A car had pulled up outside the building site and was sitting there with its engine rumbling.
‘We should get out of here,’ said Jack, dazzled by the glare.
‘But we can’t go back that way.’ The gap they had squeezed through was close to the main gate, where the car was parked.
‘There must be another way out.’ Jack peered about him. ‘There,’ he said, pointing at the fence line on the other side of the site. ‘I think I see something.’
They scurried from shadow to shadow as they heard the sound of a car door opening and closing behind them. The padlock on the main gate rattled, and then the gate itself was opening, hinges squeaking faintly in the still evening air.
Jaide tripped over a sudden dip in the ground. ‘Ooof !’
‘Shhhh!’
‘Sorry.’
‘Wait – what is this?’ Jack’s keen night sight had picked up something odd about the dip Jaide had stumbled over. It didn’t look deliberately made. Everywhere else, the ground was perfectly flat, but here the ground was churned up as though by something heavy – something that had been dragged along, creating a trench with piled-up earth on either side.
‘Who cares?’ whispered Jaide. ‘Keep moving!’
‘No, wait!’ He followed the trench backwards, towards the fence. There were secondary marks on either side, like giant scratches.
Jack gasped when he saw the fence itself. A giant hole had been ripped through it.
‘Jaide – look!’
Even in the twilight, Jaide could see the hole. ‘Great!’ she said. ‘That’s how we get out.’
Dragging him after her, she ran through the rent in the fence and off the building site. They had barely reached the road when they were caught in another set of headlights. They froze like rabbits.
With a loud engine roar, the van behind the lights lunged towards them, wheels spinning. Jack and Jaide split up and went in opposite directions, sprawling desperately out of the way. The van went between them, and Jaide caught a brief glimpse of the logo painted on its side before it sped off down the road, turned right at the next junction and disappeared into the streets of Portland.
MMM. BUILDINGS TO LIVE IN.
‘It was him!’ she gasped, ignoring the sting of her grazed hands and knees. ‘He tried to kill us!’
‘Why would he do that?’ asked Jack, scrambling painfully to his feet.
‘Because he’s part of The Evil of course!’
Jack stared back at the giant hole in the fence. He didn’t know what was going on, but he did know they were going to be in trouble when they got home. And the later they were, the bigger the trouble would be.
‘We’d better get moving,’ he said.
Jaide groaned. ‘Our bikes – they’re by the front gate.’
‘We’ll have to go quietly then.’
Taking Jaide’s hand, he led her along the fence line, to the corner bordering River Road. There were street lights there, and they hurried through the pools of relatively bright light until they reached the junction with Station Street. From there they could see their bikes, still where they had left them. Across the road, parked by the site’s main gates, was a car they both instantly recognised.
A yellow Hillman Minx.
‘Uh-oh,’ breathed Jaide.
‘‘Uh-oh’ indeed,’ said Grandma X from behind them.
Jack’s heart practically burst out of his chest, and Jaide jumped so hard her Gift kicked in and started to lift her into the sky, before Grandma X reached up and pulled her down by the ankle and set her firmly on the dirt.
‘Grandma!’ she said. ?
?You frightened me!’
‘Good. What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be home by now.’
‘We . . . got lost,’ Jack said, improvising wildly. ‘Then I dropped something. We were looking for it back there, under the lights.’
‘I don’t believe you. You came here to snoop on Mr McAndrew, didn’t you?’
‘Yes!’ said Jaide, made bolder by what she felt was the absolute truth. ‘He’s evil for sure! Why won’t you believe us?’
The sound of Grandma X’s tapping foot was startlingly loud in the falling night. ‘I’ll believe you when there’s something sensible to believe. I’ll tell you this one more time, and you must accept it. Mr McAndrew is not under the influence of The Evil. You’ve seen his eyes; they’re perfectly clear. Besides, all four wards are intact and working, so The Evil cannot get into Portland without my knowledge. Now I may not agree with Mr McAndrew’s policies on renovations and redevelopments – in fact I have argued against them many times at council meetings – but that does not make him an ally of The Evil. Just human. And that is forgivable, if not very likeable at times.’
Neither twin could meet her firm, reproving stare. They dropped their gaze, and only then did Jack notice the green-stained apron Grandma X was wearing, and Jaide the large empty soup pot at her feet.
They glanced at each other, communicating clearly and without words: What?
‘Uh, Grandma,’ said Jaide. ‘You’ve got a soup pot . . .’
Grandma X looked at the pot and picked it back up.
‘I came in a hurry,’ she said. ‘Now get your bikes and go home before your mother begins to worry.’
She ushered them back to their bikes, and then crossed to the parked car. Its engine was idling, the harsh electric glare of its headlights still spilling across the dead soil.
Grandma X opened the back door and tossed the pot on to the back seat.
‘If you only came out here looking for us,’ said Jaide, unable to suppress her curiosity, ‘why did you go through the gate?’
‘I didn’t, dear.’
‘But we heard you.’
‘You didn’t hear me,’ replied Grandma X firmly. She looked around carefully, and added, ‘It must have been someone else.’
